Insurgents stir up strife in Kirkuk

KIRKUK, Iraq — Supporters of the militant Shi’ite cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr are working with Saddam Hussein loyalists to foment ethnic strife in the contested northern city of Kirkuk, say Iraqi officials and residents.

They say Sheik al-Sadr’s Mahdi’s Army has recruited former Ba’ath Party security and intelligence officers in this oil-rich city to undermine efforts to reverse decades of ethnic cleansing under Saddam Hussein.

Saddam for years tried to “Arabize” Kirkuk by driving out native Kurds and Turkmen and giving their homes to Arabs — many of them Shi’ites relocated from the south.

Now, as Kurds try to reclaim their lost homes, Mahdi’s Army and its pro-Saddam allies are terrorizing Kurds while pressuring Arabs to remain in the city.

“While al-Sadr is battling U.S. forces in Najaf and Karbala, in Kirkuk his thugs are working among the Shi’ite Arab and Turkmen neighborhoods to stir just the kind of ethnic strife we all fear,” said a senior Kirkuk security official who requested anonymity.

They are the same men, he said, who once spied on their Shi’ite co-religionists for the former Sunni-dominated regime. “They have simply swapped their allegiances to Muqtada and are posing as Iraqi nationalists,” the police official said.

A late-night visit last week from a menacing man in black revived chilling memories for one Shi’ite resident, Amira Karim.

“‘If you choose to leave Kirkuk, you will never arrive home,’ ” Mrs. Karim quoted the man as saying outside her home on the southern edge of the city.

“‘The Arab hold on Kirkuk must be preserved against the Jews, the Kurds and all the collaborators with the infidels and the occupiers,’ ” she quoted him as saying. “‘It is your duty as a good Shi’ite Arab not to accept money to move away from here, not even to your hometown,’ ”

Two years ago, Mrs. Karim recalled, the same man had rattled the flimsy metal gate outside her house and demanded to talk to her 19-year-old son, Ali.

Ali, who was part of a clandestine anti-Saddam network, went with the man, telling his mother he would be back in an hour. She never saw him again.

The widowed mother of four learned later that the unwelcome visitor was a colonel in Saddam’s secret police.

But last week, the man said he was acting on behalf of Sheik al-Sadr, and his rhetoric closely followed the young cleric’s brand of religious nationalism tinged with violence and hatred.

Mahdi’s Army “will fight to defend and clean this city of Kurds in the name of Allah,” he said before disappearing.

Mrs. Karim knows she doesn’t belong in the city. She hails from the town of Diwaniyah, 280 miles away. She and her late husband were among thousands of Arab families — especially from the impoverished Shi’ite south — who were lured to Kirkuk by promises of jobs and financial security under Saddam’s Arabization campaign.

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